Camp Cooking Equipment You’ll Love

Camp Cooking Equipment You’ll Love

~ Carmen

Campfire Cooking

I am not the cook of the family. That would be Joe. It never fails, church potlucks or dinner parties, people always assume I cooked the fabulous dish made by my wonderful husband. Then the opposite occurs when we’re camping. The assumption is that the man makes the fire and tends the grill. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Joe can make a good fire and definitely knows how to grill a fierce steak. But when it comes to cooking over an open fire, my Girl Scout leader instincts take over (and so do I). So what compels me to move my husband away from the grill and take over the cooking whenever we hit the outdoors? It’s the cool camping equipment!

Cook Camping Equipment You’ll Love!

Iron Skillet

You can’t beat a good seasoned iron skillet! We use our iron skillet at the campground and at the house. Part of the reason an iron skillet makes such a great cooking vessel, is its seasoning. The more it is used, the more flavor is released into the food. One great reason to use an iron skillet for camping is that it can withstand high temperatures, from the top of a grill to right on hot coals. At home, we even use it to cook our steaks instead of the grill.

The first time you use your skillet, just wash it with hot water and dry it immediately with paper towels. Then apply a thin coating of vegetable oil, just enough to give it a sheen, not too much to where it is sticky. The oil will season the iron and keep it from rusting. If you happen to not dry it completely or oil it enough and it starts to rust, it is an easy fix. Just scrub off the rust and recoat it. Do not use soap to wash it. That will strip off the seasoning and the soap will seep into the pores of the iron. Then your food will have a soapy taste the next time you use it. If you take care of your skillet, it will last a lifetime. My skillet was my mom’s. Knowing she used it on our family camping trips, make it even more special to use with my own family.

This is how breakfast is done!

Metal Coffee Pot

We love ours (pictured above). Didn’t that make a great picture for our instagram feed? It heats up very fast over a fire or on a camp stove. Plus you can’t help but feel like a pioneer using it!

It comes with the filter as shown for brewing coffee grounds, but I must admit that we don’t mess with trying to time how long it should percolate. We mainly use it to heat up water fast. Then we pick out our favorite flavor of Starbuck Via (my fav is the Columbian pictured below), pour into our hot cup of water. It hits the spot on a crisp camping morning. I know all of you coffee connoisseurs are getting a little huffy right now with the idea of instant coffee, but it works for us!

Camp Stove Toaster

I know what you’re thinking. Is it really that important to have toasted bread when you’re out camping. Of course not. But these little toasters are cheap, a breeze to use, and fold back down for storage. Whenever we go camping with other families, everyone always is amazed at how well this little contraption works. So we get a lot of, “Mind if I throw a little piece of bread on there?” It doesn’t take long to toast the bread, just a couple of minutes on each side. You can see it being used over a fire (in the picture with the coffee pot), or on a camper stove (pictured below).

Toast is a perfect addition to a big camping breakfast.

For the price and fun of it, you can’t beat a little toaster as part of your camp cooking equipment!

Dutch Oven

We love using our Lodge Dutch Oven so much we actually have two. One that stays in our camping, and one we keep in our kitchen at home. Just like the cooking capabilities of an iron skillet, a dutch oven can be used in all types of cooking conditions. We recently added a stuffed bell pepper and a peach cobbler recipe on the blog that uses a dutch oven!

The care and cleaning of a dutch oven is the same as an iron. We recently made peach cobbler in ours, and Joe got a bit frustrated with the sugar that had seeped into the iron “pores”. I looked on Amazon (where they have everything made for mankind) and discovered that you can purchase dutch oven liners if you have something especially messy. However, I wouldn’t recommend using the liners very often. I think that defeats the purpose of have a seasoned pot.

Cooking Stuffed Bell Peppers. If I had wanted to use more coals on top, I would have flipped the lid over for a flat surface.

We recently add the tripod to hold the dutch oven when using firewood as our heat source. I like that I can vary how close I cook to the coals by changing the length of the chain. You can also use the tripod to hold a grill grate or a lantern.

Pie Iron

This is our newest addition to our camp cooking equipment. We had so much fun with this little guy on our last trip, I’ve already ordered a couple more!

Just big enough for sliced bread.

We make some sandwich pockets, but my favorite entree that we made was fruit pies. Pretty much all you need is biscuits (like Grands) and fruit filling. Divide the biscuit dough in half, pressing each half into one of the pie iron squares. Put a couple spoonfuls of pie filling in the middle, close the pie iron, and cook over a fire or charcoal. It only took a couple of minutes on each side and was done!

Joe making a fruit pie

I can see kids really getting into using the pie irons. See 6 Reasons to Take Your Kids Camping for more information why you need to get those kiddos in a tent. There are clamps that keep the two sides together so if it is too hot for them, they can lay the pie iron right on the coals and keep at a cooler distance until ready. I used a fork to pull the fruit pie out of the pie iron because it does get really, really hot, but Joe being the manly man just used his fingers. The clean up and care is the same as an iron skillet or dutch oven.

Since I had never cooked with a pie iron before I ordered and used this great, little recipe book. It was well worth the $7.99!

See why I like camp cooking? There’s all this fun camp cooking equipment that you get to use. The Amazon links that we provided are affiliate links meaning that if you order using the links in our post, we make a small commission (which costs you nothing) that helps pay for the blog. As always we only recommend products that we actually use and like.

So have you used any of the above mentioned cooking equipment? Maybe you grew up watching your grandmother making biscuits in her prized iron skillet! We’d love to hear your comments by replying below. Keep up with our next camping adventures by following us on social media and subscribing to our weekly newsletter.

~Carmen

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I love using my cast iron skillet and dutch oven at home-but I bet the food inside would taste even better cooked over an open fire! Thanks for the great post, this has definitely put me in the mood to go camping with my hubby soon!

Now I understand why our last skillet rusted over so badly we had to toss it! Eeep. Never washing it with soap again (or drying it, but when I was a kid, I was taught to wash dishes until they were clean of oil and then dry them, so I’ve been pretty uptight about how clean our dishes are. Leaving oil on? I’ll have to break my habits)! All this gear looks a little heavy for the type of camping we do (ultra light), but I think we’ll bring a lot of thing along on our longer trips with family. A camp stove toaster is such a great idea! 🙂 Thanks for sharing the gear you use.

that’s quite a lot of stuff, but it must give you so much flexibility – you can cook pretty much anything you want with all this! we usually just have one pot, small gas cooker and a couple of bowls and cups, so we cook really basic things:)

We love our iron skillet at home and when we go camping too! It’s such a durable piece of cooking equipment. Love the pie iron! I’m going to try to convince Tim to get one for our next camping trip. Yay for camping!

YESSSS! Yay for the pie irons. One other advantage is it essentially baking in a closed space and not deep FRIED! We will have to try battering sliced Twinkies or Snickers and cooking them in the pie irons and ahem … less calories.

Oana thanks for your post. We are glad we could share the travel side of camping and the new cuisine you can prepare like grilled cheese sandwiches, patty melts and desserts! We read your aroundthecompass blog and were intrigued with you and Cristian journeys of the European backyard. We love all your travel adventures and hope to follow in your footsteps. Thanks from packyourbaguios

[…] dealing with wet conditions. For me, I’m usually in a hurry to start cooking (see Camp Cooking Equipment You’ll Love) Below are the directions for making a firestarter that is easy to light, burns slowly, recycles […]

[…] always looking for dishes that would do well in my seasoned dutch oven ( see Camp Cooking Equipment You’ll Love). To be a good camping recipe, it also needs to be easy. Often, we don’t start coals […]

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